Dani asked Chelsea Cain:

How in the world do you manage to tangle, and untangle all the complicated, amazing, human relationships in your books?! The Gretchen Lowell books were favorites of mine, but now I have to go all fangirl and say One Kick has replaced all of them. Don't worry, they haven't gone WAY down the list... just bumped a little bit. ;)

Chelsea Cain That is the nicest thing you could have said. So thank you. Okay. To answer your question, honestly I think of each book as a chapter in a larger - very large - story. Both the Kick series and the Archie/Gretchen series are concerned with events that occur before we meet the characters (Kick's abduction as a kid; Archie's abduction by Gretchen). Each book is just an excuse to put the characters in different situations that will reveal more of their back story, expanding and contradicting what we think we know. The challenge is to know how much to reveal when. Character motivations and relationships are similar. I really like subverting what we think we know about someone, having a character do something unexpected. That's the real mystery, right? You might turn pages quickly to see if Archie catches the killer, but it's his relationship with Gretchen that drives the books. Kick and Bishop will solve a crime or rescue someone in every Kick book. But that's just an excuse for me to explore what I'm really interested in: Kick's relationships with the people around her (Mel, her mother, Frank, James, her sister Marnie, Bishop) and her back story, which I promise you is much more complicated than we think it is. Basically I play cards close to my vest and reveal as little information as possible. That's my secret. Don't tell anyone.

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